Posted by Atticus on August 22, 2004, at 3:55:15
In reply to Re: poem ... Red-Tinted World of Slow Time, 1988 » Atticus, posted by malthus on August 21, 2004, at 23:32:10
Hi Malthus,
Thanks for the kind words. Actually, "slow time" wasn't (at least consciously) meant as a play on show time. It's an actual psychological state I've experienced from time to time. It's very much like what Tom Hanks' character experiences a couple of times during the Omaha Beach invasion scene at the start of "Saving Private Ryan". After "The Matrix" came out, with its famous scene of Neo dodging the bullets, some people started referring to this as "bullet time." Whatever you call it, it's a sense of dissociation with my normal perceptions of time that is so pronounced that I seem to be watching events unfold in slow-motion, and as if from a great distance. I don't have any idea if this is related to my mental illness or not (some kind of dissociative disorder). It always occurs under extreme emotional duress. All I can say is that my response to "Tripper's" real-life counterpart's words and actions -- even given the fact that I was all of 17 years old -- left me as stunned afterwards as he was. And my friends were. And it sure caused me a world of trouble. Poor impulse control has been something I've wrestled with a long time. Granted, Tripper only ended up with a superficial cut and a big bruise, and a whole lot of help from my friends and my father kept me from ending up cuffed in the back of a cop's black-and-white, but the damage to my relationship with Temple turned out to be irreparable. I think the trigger for recounting this sorry episode was that Jai got upset after her attempt at a serious discussion on Psycho-Social-Babble was kind of hijacked from her and she expressed her hurt. I almost wrote a post flaming the people responsible, but decided against it when I thought about this incident. I still earned my first "Please be civil" from Dr. Bob for expressing my disgust on this page, but I guess that's kind of a rite of passage on this site, eh? :) Atticus
poster:Atticus
thread:380468
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040729/msgs/380707.html